The mass child abduction by Boko Haram that remains ignored

Built on a half-parched river bed that snakes through the arid Sahel of northern Nigeria, the ancient town of Damasak fights a never-ending battle with the dunes of the advancing Sahara.

These days, though, it is not just the residents' farms and crops that are disappearing into the surrounding desert. Last year, Boko Haram gunmen abducted some 300 local children, whose whereabouts have remained a mystery ever since.

If the story has a familiar ring to it, that is not surprising.

Exactly two years ago today in the town of Chibok, 200 miles south from Damasak, Boko Haram carried out arguably the most publicised mass child abduction of modern times, kidnapping some 219 schoolgirls as they sat exams at a local government secondary school.

A Boko Haram video from 2014 of the missing Chibok schoolgirlsCredit:
AFP

Yet while the Chibok girls won global attention - thanks to the celebrity-backed bringbackourgirls social media campaign - the even bigger missing case at Damasak has gone all but unnoticed by the outside world.

No hashtag campaign that has gone viral, or had endorsement by Michele Obama or Angelina Jolie. No US satellites or teams of Scotland Yard hostage negotiators have been sent to help look for them. And the name of the school from where the children vanished - Zanna Mobarti Primary - has never "trended" online.

"The social media campaign for the Chibok girls has been absolutely helpful, otherwise people would have given up altogether," says Mausi Segun, Human Rights Watch’s researcher for Nigeria, who has pieced together the Damasak abduction in detail.

"But every time I travel in northeast Nigeria, people ask me why nobody is asking about the abducted children from Damasak."

Believed to have been the largest kidnapping that Boko Haram has ever carried out, the events at Damasak began in November 2014, when Boko Haram was at the height of its powers in Nigeria.

Not only was it murdering, pillaging and raping with impunity, it had also seized control of numerous towns in northeast Nigeria, turning them into a self-declared "Caliphate" where its black jihadist flag fluttered unchallenged.

Damasak, a mud-walled town of 200,000 near the border with Niger, became part of that "Caliphate" shortly after dawn on November 24, when Boko Haram footsoldiers stormed their way in.

Up to 80 local menfolk were massacred over coming days, while the gunmen commandeered Zanna Mobarti Primary school as a base and locked inside more than 300 students aged 7 to 17, witnesses told Human Rights Watch.

Boko Haram's leader, Abubakr ShekauCredit:
AFP

"It was early morning when I heard gunshots and chaos," said one woman. "I grabbed my two children, a boy age four years and a girl age two years, and ran. But Boko Haram detained us in the middle of the town. They brought more and more women and children to where we were kept, then they took all of us to Zanna Mobarti Primary School. I have not seen my children since then."

A local chief, later interviewed by the AFP news agency, added: "They also went into town and forcibly seized children from their mothers, children too old to be breastfed. My 16 nephews were among the children kidnapped."

Witnesses claim the children were held prisoner in the primary school for the next four months, with Boko Haram separating the boys from the girls and forcing to learn the Koran endlessly. A number are said to have died after being fed rotting food.

Boko Haram's grip on Damasak ended the following March, when soldiers from neighbouring Chad - exasperated at the Nigerian army's own lack of progress - staged their own cross-border incursions and pushed them out.

The terror group left behind them a scene of carnage, with at least 70 bodies left near a bridge over a dried-up river bed, the dead half-buried in sand.

Bodies found in a mass grave outside Damasak after Boko Haram fledCredit:
AFP

There was, though, no sign anywhere of the schoolchildren, whom the group are thought to have spirited away with them into the bush.

Ms Segun said that Human Rights Watch said it had tracked down at least six people who said their children were still missing, as well as a woman who was kidnapped in a separate abduction, who met them in a Boko Haram camp in neighbouring Chad.

However, unlike the Chibok case six months before, there has been no international vigils for the Damasak children, and little international pressure on Nigerian officials to act.

Indeed, in terms of an official response, all that that Damasak case ever had in common with the Chibok case was denials from Nigeria's then president, Goodluck Jonathan, that it ever happened in the first place.

Just as his government claimed that the Chibok case was a fiction to start off with, so too did they dispute the claims that anyone ever went missing in Damasak.

"There is no fresh kidnapping in Damasak," insisted Mike Omeri, Nigeria's then national security spokesman, when asked about the abductions last year.

True, given that Damasak remains a ghost town to this day - even Human Rights Watch deemed it unsafe to visit - it is hard to be certain exactly what happened either way.

But Ms Segun says she has "absolutely confidence" that the children are missing, pointing out that as the Nigerian security forces were not present when Boko Haram were forced to flee, they are hardly in a position to know better.

Nigerian soldiers on the hunt for Boko Haram insurgentsCredit:
AFP

Local residents, meanwhile, also say that in the wake of the Goodluck regime's anger over the Chibok case, they were scared to make a fuss in the early days.

"We kept quiet on the kidnap out of fear of drawing the wrath of the government, which was already grappling with the embarrassment of the kidnap of the Chibok schoolgirls," one local official, whose seven-year-old child is missing, told AFP last month. "Every parent was afraid to speak out, and the government didn't want the news out."

Since Human Rights Watch's investigation, he added, locals had become emboldened enough to speak out on their own.

But would it have made any difference had they done so nearer the time?

Human Rights Watch is unsure. Ms Segun points out that when Boko Haram fled with the girls from Damasak, Nigeria was on the eve of the elections that removed Mr Jonathan from power.

Even if there had been hard proof of their abduction at the time, the country's attention was elsewhere - as, indeed, was that of the wider world, pre-occupied by then with the Islamic State's takeover of northern Iraq.

It is also debatable whether a social media campaign would have made any difference anyway. In the case of the Chibok girls, some argue that the publicity has had the side effect of increasing their symbolic value as hostages, making it less likely that Boko Haram will release them.

Hashtag campaign or not, though, Ms Segun now wants people to take notice.

“The authorities need to wake up and find out where the Damasak children and other captives are," she said. "Then they should take urgent steps to free them.”